[Liam]

What technique do you use for reducing to a single box?

With a double brood box coming into the flow, there will be too many frames to fit into a single box and I was wondering if you experienced any queen cell raising in the second now queen free box?

Its also a time of large bee numbers and queens can be harder to locate.

 

[Liam]

Thanks KiwiBee

That sounds like a v productive strategy that would transpose to here v easily.
It also sounds like it negates autumn feeding.

When do you time your split? If the split is done too easrly, would the queen right colony potentially become swarmy? And if done too late, would the queenless split not generate a queen in time for the flow?

 

[Liam]

Thanks Kiwibee

I have extracted some of the honey in the second deep box by taking out the outer capped frames. This approach would be time consuming for several hives though and your method would make this unnecessary.

I would worry about my bees going swarmy if they were split 2 months before the flow and confined to a single brood box.

Last year, I made up a nuke on a spring flow that filled all available space whilst they were waiting for the queen cell to mature then get mated.

I was thinking was that your thinking was by splitting the double boxes just before the flow, the second queenless hive would generate more foraging bees as all of the emerged brood won't have new brood to care for and there would be more foragers.

Is my thinking flawed?

I'm thinking I may have to compare your 2 queen system to the double broox box split method.